Despite the hype, it is difficult to know whether Disney's forthcoming Tron: Legacy will be a hit or not. On the one hand, it is clearly an expensive and spectacular movie, with remarkable production design, a pioneering score, and some, apparently, deeply impressive 3D (it is the first film since Avatar to have been filmed in 3D, rather than retrospectively converted). A lot of time, effort and cash has also been spent promoting the movie. On the other hand, the original Tron was a barely known commercial failure. Beyond a handful of ageing geeks, Tron was, until very recently, a brand with little-to-no cultural standing. When I asked my students in November if they wanted to take a trip to see the film in Imax, the majority politely declined – they had no idea what Tron was. What's more, despite a reported $170m (£107m) budget, Tron: Legacy was made by an untested, first-time director called Joseph Kosinski. There have also been rumours of late script changes and emergency reshoots.

All of this means that Tron: Legacy constitutes a significant risk for the Disney corporation. It has done what it can to ensure success, but some of the strategies that big companies usually use to manage risk have not been deployed: for all the spectacle, Tron: Legacy is based on a relatively unpopular source text, and it has not been made by an established talent. This may cause low-grade anxiety at Disney, but for observers of Hollywood, big gambles like this are almost always interesting. And Disney is staking the farm on Tron: in addition to the movie, there is a videogame, a forthcoming TV series and talk of a sequel. Daft Punk's soundtrack is already a bestseller, and is moving to the top of the album charts in the UK and US as I write. Kosinski has signed up to direct another remake of another commercial flop from the early 1980s, The Black Hole. Much of this is swagger. Disney is acting like it has a hit, to encourage us to believe that Tron: Legacy will be a hit. However, Tron's seemingly triumphant return from obscurity also tells us something about the history of the Disney corporation as it has moved into the modern age.

Disney's origins as a company stretch back to the emergence of sound cinema in the late 1920s. Throughout the 30s and 40s, Walt Disney ran a successful and well regarded production house, but he only really achieved significant industrial status in the 50s. While other studios struggled to deal with the consequences of new antitrust rules and declining audiences, Disney grew his company, establishing a distribution wing, creating a number of successful TV series, and constructing a theme park that would become a leisure destination for families across the world. At this moment Disney shifted from being a well known film-maker, to becoming a global brand. In many ways, Disney became the dominant provider of "quality" children's entertainment for America, and to some extent, for the rest of the western world too. Disney's masterstroke was to target the child and family audience at precisely the moment when children and families became the dominant demographic group in the US, as a result of the postwar "baby boom".

The company remained successful until well after Disney's death in 1966. While the rest of the film industry focused on edgy, more explicit films in the 60s and early 70s, Disney had hits like The Aristocats, One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Love Bug. However, Disney's fortunes began to flag at precisely the moment when the other Hollywood studios began to ape its practices. Following the success of Fox's Star Wars in 1977, Hollywood reoriented much of its production to focus on family-friendly blockbusters that addressed children just as much as they did everyone else. If anything, Disney's approach in the 50s and 60s became the dominant approach to blockbuster subjects across the industry in the 80s. The trade newspaper Variety even described Spielberg's ET: The Extra-Terrestrial as "the best Disney film Disney never made", and much of the Spielberg/Lucas oeuvre that came to dominate in the 80s had direct or indirect connections to the fairytale escapism of classic Disney. Bearing in mind the dominance of the "Disney model", one might have expected the company to remain at the forefront of the industry, but in fact, Disney struggled to maintain its identity and appeal. With Walt Disney's son-in-law, Ron Miller, acting as chief executive, the company launched a series of increasingly desperate and unsuccessful attempts to recapture its audiences, and its film-making mojo.

The original Tron, released in 1982, was a product of this desperation. The studio's traditional animation department was beginning to implode, and its attempts to capitalise on Star Wars, with The Black Hole in 1979, had ended in financial disaster. Executives were struggling to come up with a formula for success, and, on paper at least, Tron looked promising. The film was based on the emergent culture of computer games and home computing more generally, it used pioneering computer effects, and it boasted a relatively innovating, hi-tech aesthetic (at least for the time). But it turned out to be just another box office flop: it barely broke even with revenues of $33m in a year when ET: The Extra Terrestrial returned $360m.

Disney's fortunes did eventually revive. Michael Eisner took over as chief executive in 1983, and slowly turned the company around. Tron also reached a larger audience as the home video market took off. However, the film is the product of a very low ebb in Disney's history, a moment when the Disney corporation seemed more disconnected from audience preferences than at any other time in its history. It was a commercial and creative mis-step, so it's more than a little curious that the studio would want to revisit and rework this movie over and above its many hits.

However, the decision to revive Tron tells us something about the very long game that the major Hollywood studios are playing. Tron may have failed on first release, but it has sat in the studios archives and in the larger cultural memory, slowly accruing value. Disney has returned to the film at a time when cinema technology is changing dramatically, and when the company itself is seeking to reconnect to its past in all sorts of ways. And Tron, for all the fact that it failed at first, now offers an opportunity. For decades, industry historians have described films like Tron and The Black Hole as failures, as signs of the company's misjudgment. But Disney is now busy proving us wrong. Because if one can wait decades, even a terrible flop can eventually prove its value, and become a hit. At least, that's the plan.